The sound of discord

An avant garde composer who eschews melody, he is acclaimed as a genius. But his critics say he has led music up a blind alley. His bizarre beliefs and unorthodox home life have raised eyebrows, but he recently caused outrage when he said that the World Trade Centre attack was 'the greatest work of art'. John O'Mahony reports

A Temple of New Music; The Mount Sinai of Serialism: whatever you choose to call it, the Stockhausen complex at Kürten is a remote and mysterious spot. Situated in the German countryside at the end of a winding road that sweeps through farmland and dense forest, it is less than an hour's drive outside Cologne - but the silence is intoxicating and the sense of peace almost tangible. Each of the stark, white buildings - concert hall, rehearsal rooms, and the house where the composer lives with "wives" number three and four, the American saxophonist Suzanne Stephens and the Dutch flautist Kathinka Pasveer - is insulated by fir trees. And as the visitor turns the last bend in the road, it all rears up magnificently, seeming to occupy the entire hillside.

For the past 35 years, this complex has been the centre of gravity in Stockhausen's life and work. He was born in an equally isolated village just beyond Cologne, and it was under similar open skies that he dreamt up his first compositions. In the 60s, he and his second wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister, acquired this land with a view to establishing a commune where artists and musicians could exchange ideas. Now, every year, the bemused locals are inundated by students from the Stockhausen summer school, filling the district's only restaurant, all discussing the joys of serialism and atonal music.

But, primarily, Kürten serves as a refuge for Stockhausen. Every morning, he locks himself in his studio, packed with synthesisers and mixing desks, to work on his mammoth opera Licht (Light). And it was to Kürten that he retreated last week, when the controversy about his reported claim that the World Trade Centre attack was "the greatest work of art ever" was exploding around him.

"My connection to this landscape has become deeper and deeper," he says. "In the beginning of the 60s, I thought of living in Sicily, and at one stage I bought an island in Finland. I've always wanted to live in this kind of pure, green countryside, in communion with the forest and the trees and bushes, where I could plant life with my own two hands and watch it grow. I need this light, this feeling of total liberty."

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the great figures in modern com position, a revolutionary whose shadow stretches across contemporary music in all its incarnations. Along with such avant garde goliaths as Pierre Boulez and John Cage, he embodies the iconoclastic spirit that has torn away old certainties such as melody and fixed time-signatures, and recast the fundamentals of music in the 20th century: "His influence has been enormous," says Boulez. "He invented a new kind of relationship between music's components. He has changed our view of musical time and form."

Often said to be excruciatingly "difficult", Stockhausen's early work is the epitome of "total" serialism, taking the precepts of Schoenberg's 12-tone system - which, instead of the more familiar seven-note diatonic scale with its keys and keynotes, employed an atonal model, in which 12 chromatic tones were marshalled into rows - and applied them to every musical element: pitch, tempo, timbre, duration and intensity.

With the music now obeying mathematical or spatial (or even spiritual) rather than harmonic principles, this approach unleashed such ground-breaking pieces as Gruppen (Groups, 1957), in which three separate orchestras, each playing at a different tempo, seem to shear painfully into each other like instrumental buzz-saws. Equally radical is the infamous Helikopter Streichquartett (Helicopter String Quartet, 1995), performed as the musicians hover above the audience in four helicopters.

However, modern electronic music is where Stockhausen has been most influential, touching artists as diverse as the Beatles (who recycled his Hymnen - Anthems - in the White Album's Revolution Number 9), Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, Laurie Anderson and many more. With the most rudimentary technology, Stockhausen created electronic pieces as neurotically beautiful as Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1956), in which a young boy's hymn is periodically dipped in what can only be described as an electronic groan. Later, the composer would be the first to experiment with "live electronics", feeding sounds through the electronic grinder during performance to produce his Mikrophonie pieces (1964-65). "Teutonic exactitude combined with anarchistic bollocks, is how I'd describe him," says producer William Orbit, who appears alongside Stockhausen in next month's Elektronic Festival at the Barbican in London.

"There are so many musicians who have made a whole career out of one of his periods," says the Icelandic singer and songwriter Björk. "He goes one step ahead, discovers something that's never been done musically, and by the time other people have grasped it, he's on to the next thing." Others, however, feel Stockhausen led music up a blind alley: "There is a good joke about a concert of a very avant garde piece," says the composer Philip Glass, who led the minimalist reaction to him. "One audience member comes up to another and says: 'You know, that piece is much better than it sounds.'" Many others have criticised the music for being too cold and forbidding.

Since the late 60s, Stockhausen's work has continually veered towards esoteric New Age beliefs, sometimes tipping over into the downright bizarre, earning him his reputation as the mad messiah of modern music. His trippy 1971 piece Sternklang(Starsound) was conceived as "a preparation for beings from other stars and for the day of their arrival here".

For the past 24 years he has been working on his vast Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts) Licht (Die Sieben Tage der Woche) - Light (The Seven Days of the Week) - which combines elements of his biography in a grandiose and often risible operatic drama of the struggle of mankind over evil, as represented by the work's arch-villain Lucifer. "He has stirred up his mixture of ersatz 'operatic' seasoning and kitschy stagecraft," wrote one critic of the piece, which is split into seven days of the week, "and leavened the whole with contrivances of such mind-bending theatrical ineptitude that the musical riches of his score, such as they are, have been nearly all overwhelmed."

Despite an unnerving habit of staring off into the corner of the room while recounting the precise dates and times of premieres half a century ago, he comes across as a warm and engaging host. But the famed eccentricity is obvious, not least in his dress style of dazzling white jeans and embroidered Mexican shirt topped off with a fluorescent green cardigan, just one of an entire wardrobe of such cardigans, each worn on a specific day of the week corresponding to the decor of the different days of Licht. While his obvious magnetism and the magnitude of his personality are universally lauded, most people acknowledge a more difficult, at times tyrannical character lurking beneath. In rehearsal, he is renowned for his relentless perfectionism, which has been known to boil over. "He is calmer now than in his early years," says his son, the trumpeter Markus Stockhausen. "But when he gets furious, if technical things go wrong or the musicians are too slow, it is sometimes not very nice because the same amount of energy, when it turns around, can be very uncomfortable."

The same tyrannical approach is applied to his personal life, as even close family members have discovered: "I haven't had any contact whatsoever with Karlheinz for 30 years," says his sister Katharina Ernst, who lives just outside Cologne. "I did make some overtures a number of years ago and went to meet his daughter, who was playing in a concert nearby. But apparently Karlheinz then forbade the children to talk to me. I really don't know why. He lives in a different region from normal-thinking people."

Stockhausen surrounds himself with a close circle of devotees, many of whom share his enthusiasm for the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo: both his current "wives" - he is not legally married to either - are Aurobindo disciples, and his second wife, Mary Bauermeister, believes that these eastern philosophies have given her powers of astral projection which she uses to monitor Karlheinz's marital infidelities.

Those who have moved away from his tightknit circle find themselves summarily cut off: "You are either with him, or you betray him," says the music therapist Jill Purce, who was his partner in the early 70s. "He is not wise, in a way," says Bauermeister. "At the heart of his view of the world is the idea of the enemy. I always thought that when he was old he would forget about it. Overall, there is this conflict in him of good and evil. And he is there in the middle of it all. Only if you know his life can you understand it."

Stockhausen's drift towards mysticism and his more outlandish statements, including assertions that he was born on a planet orbiting the star Sirius, have baffled and disturbed old friends: "He is very much enclosed in himself - he doesn't see anything else," says Boulez. "It was always like that but the more he goes on the more it is like that. This kind of guru aspect for me is not acceptable."

The scandal concerning his comments about the World Trade Centre atrocity have deepened this concern. Reports in the German and international press claimed that, at a press conference last week for a series of concerts in Hamburg, he said: "That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for 10 years, completely fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. Against that, we composers are nothing."

Stockhausen later insisted that his quotes had been "ripped out of context" and that he had actually said the terrorist attack was "the greatest work of art by Lucifer ", though this wasn't enough to prevent the organisers from cancelling his Hamburg concerts. A posting on the stockhausen.org website reports that the Kürten city council has also threatened to pull the plug on his courses. Since returning to Kürten, Stockhausen has cancelled all contacts with journalists, and it looks likely that he will be even less open in his communications in future. Whether this is likely to shake or steel his resolve and sense of destiny remains to be seen: "All my life I have been convinced that there is an angel constantly guiding me," he says. "Depending on the tasks I have set myself, and that have been set for me, the angel changes. They specialise in particular subjects, stages of life, and also particular kinds of creative activity. My angel is highly experienced in questions of music."

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on August 22 1928, just outside Cologne in the small village of Mödrath, now swallowed up by an opencast mine; he was the first son of Simon Stockhausen, an impoverished schoolteacher, and Gertrud (née Stupp). When Karlheinz was four, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum: "I can still see my father bringing her downstairs, holding her tightly because my mother kept wanting to go to the window, shouting: 'Just let me die!' Suddenly she pointed to the cellar door and shouted: 'Down there is hell!' And then she pointed up the stairs and cried: 'Up there is heaven. I want to go up to the loft.' " Some time afterwards, Simon Stockhausen began a relationship with their housekeeper, Luzia, whom he married in 1938.

From a young age, Karlheinz displayed a precocious talent for music: "He gave piano recitals from the age of eight," says his sister Katharina. "He was also fooling around with his own weird compositions." But the emphasis of his early life seems to have been primarily on rural pursuits: "We were far more interested in hunting," says his childhood friend Josef Jost, "killing little rabbits, trout fishing, just the two of us, roaming in the wilderness." Young Karlheinz was also deeply religious, a tendency which blossomed when the devoutly Catholic family settled in Altenberg: "My bedroom window looked out over the cathedral. It was a beautiful sight which influenced me very much. I went to church regularly, during the week as well as on Sundays."

At the onset of the war, Stockhausen's institutionalised mother fell victim to the Nazis' euthanasia policy. His father volunteered for the German army and was killed in Hungary in 1945: "He told me that he wanted to die," Stockhausen says. "The last time I saw him, he said: 'I won't come back, now take care of yourself.' " For a brief period, Karlheinz himself was a stretcher-bearer at a military hospital, where he witnessed horrific injuries caused by phosphorous bombs that the allies were using.

After the war, Stockhausen enrolled on a "music education" course at the National Conservatory of Music in Cologne. Inspired by Herman Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game, he seemed at first more consumed with literary ambitions, and in 1949 wrote a novel, Geburt im Tot (Birth in Death), whose themes of regeneration foreshadow Licht. But after encounters with the music of Bartok and Stravinsky, Stockhausen redirected his passions into music: "Interest is much too weak a word," says fellow student Hermann Braun. "He was completely consumed by the music. He would go on through the night. He shared a room with a philosophy student and almost drove the poor guy mad."

Among his first compositions was the song series Drei Lieder (Three Songs), dedicated to a young music student, Doris Andreae, whom he married at the end of 1951. Though the piece was rejected for performance at the Darmstadt summer school that year, Stockhausen went along anyway to attend courses that were scheduled to be given by Schoenberg and the musique concrète pioneer Peter Schaeffer. Among other composers attending, Stockhausen encountered Karel Goeyvaerts, a young Belgian who introduced him to the radical theories of Olivier Messiaen and to the music of Anton von Webern, the father of "total serialism".

Goeyvaerts also brought along one of his own sonatas for two pianos: "I still remember how he tried to explain the 'spiritual bases' of my new technique to other people over lunch," Goeyvaerts later wrote. "I had told him everything in a mishmash of German and English but, despite my stammering, he quickly grasped it all." Herbert Eimert gave Stockhausen a copy of his study of the 12-tone system, Atonale Musiklehre (Atonal Music Teachings).

On his return to Cologne, Stockhausen immediately began com posing the first work of his maturity, Kreuzspiel (Crossplay), an exercise in musical pointillism in which notes from a single piano seem to attract other instruments like charged atomic particles. "I was influenced by the Einsteinian concept of the universal formula," he says now, "and also by [the architects] Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, whose modular theory is very close to the thinking of serial music." At the premiere in Darmstadt the following year, even the orchestra managed to express its displeasure at the extreme nature of the work, when the clarinettist suddenly let rip with a loud toot in a passage marked pianissimo: "People thought, 'This is no music, this is crazy,' " Stockhausen says. "For the first time in the history of music, a piece was made up of individual notes. There were no melodies."

In 1952, he graduated from the Cologne conservatory and travelled to Paris to study under Messiaen. There, he met Pierre Boulez, who had been impressed by his rigorous Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces): "Many of the composers in Paris were second- or even third-rate, so here was somebody with whom I could speak," Boulez says, "He had a very strong personality, he still does." The two soon became close, though their friendship was characterised from the beginning by intense conflicts: "He was very quick, very imaginative, but he was not critical," Boulez continues. "I tried to compensate for this lack of critical sense ."

As important as the encounter with Boulez were Stockhausen's first experiments with electronic music, which took place in a little studio in the technical college of the PTT (the French post office) in the centre of Paris: "I wanted to synthesise, to actually make the sounds themselves," Stockhausen says. With just a sine-wave generator and slivers of spliced magnetic tape, he set to work on his first concrète étude , a rattling, thump ing conglomeration of jagged electronic whirs and scratches. When he returned to Cologne in May 1953, this work continued in the studio of the Cologne Radio building. Stockhausen completed Studie I and II, which received their premieres in Darmstadt in 1954, where no live performers appeared on stage. This premiere, incidentally, saw the first meeting of Stockhausen and John Cage, who influenced his experiments in aleatory - chance-based - music.

The following year, Stockhausen returned to purely orchestral music for what is regarded by his champions as one of the landmarks of 20th-century music, Gruppen, a piece for three separate orchestra groups, each governed by a complex, scientifically derived schema of overlapping tempi. At the same time Stockhausen was continuing his work with electronic music, and in 1955-56 he produced Gesang der Jünglinge. The premiere in May 1956, in which loudspeakers surrounded the audience, was a triumph and a scandal; it produced turbulent protests as well as comparisons with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. At the end of the decade, Stockhausen produced Kontakte (Contacts), his first venture into "moment form".

By this time, the composer had already met Bauermeister, a striking, energetic young artist who would have a huge impact on his life. Initially, however, a considerable impediment lay in their path: Stockhausen was still married to Doris, with whom he had produced four children, Suja, Christel, Markus and Majella. At first, Bauermeister, whose own father had left her mother for another woman, resisted, though her resolve was soon broken: "I thought that I could keep it platonic. But then the composer Cornelius Cardew told me that Stockhausen had other women. That must have broken my resistance."

Almost immediately, Bauer meister's influence was seen in the controversial music theatre work Originale (1961), a Rauschenberg-style happening, featuring the Korean performance artist Nam June Paik, who smeared himself from head to toe in shaving foam and then leapt into a bath of red paint to the accompaniment of Stockhausen's score. Bauermeister also opened Stockhausen to mystical religious influences: "I believed in outer space beings," she says. "I knew of past lives. I broke down his Catholic belief system. I learned structure, and he learned chaos."

At Bauermeister's insistence, Stockhausen did not initially leave Doris and the children, but attempted the first of his experiments in polygamy, his new lover simply becoming part of the family. This arrangement is reflected in his 1962 work Momente, which is made up of three musical elements: K-moments (Klang or timbre), M-moments (melody) and D-moments (duration), which also corresponded to Karlheinz, Mary and Doris. But while the piece is the perfect realisation of "moment form", the unmanageable threesome was less successful: "It didn't feel right," says Bauermeister. "Maybe if we were all part of the hippy generation it would have worked. But Doris was always the first wife, and the first wife has the right to feel jealous." The three even tried sleeping in the same bed together: "We just giggled and played cards. We were not shameless enough to do it, but we were courageous enough to try."

In between increasingly frequent trips to the US, and guest professorships at the universities of Pennsylvania and California, Stockhausen had continued to develop the possibilities of "live electronic" music, culminating in Mikrophonie I and II (1964 and 1965), in which sounds of a tam-tam coming into contact with household items were all fed directly through electronic filters and potentiometers during performance. He had already begun work on Hymnen, in which various national anthems are soaked in bubbling short-wave radio static and sliced up by synthesised shrieks. When his face appeared on the cover of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band album in 1967 it confirmed Stockhausen as the world's most famous contemporary composer.

However, Stockhausen's personal life was about to unravel. In 1967, Bauermeister was pregnant for the second time with his child, and they decided to marry: "By that time he was already in love with another woman," says Bauermeister. "We were just in our hotel on the first night of our honeymoon and I realised that his heart was somewhere else. So, I told him to take me back to San Francisco and go and see her. He started crying and said 'thank you'. He brought me home and went off with her."

During this separation, Bauermeister first encountered the ideas of Sri Aurobindo, which, she believes, gave her powers of astral projection. "I could project my mind and see exactly what Karlheinz was doing," she says, alluding to his continuing affairs. In May 1968, she sent a letter to him at their new home in Kürten breaking off the relationship and prompting Stockhausen to begin an immediate hunger strike: "Every day a telegram came saying he was going to die and that I should come to him," she recalls. "But I could just go into my inner self and then project to see what he was going through and I knew he was all right. It was a very helpful and truthful revolution." By the third day, Stockhausen was undergoing his own spiritual revolution, fuelled by the same ideas of Sri Aurobindo: "During the seven days I had wonderful visions and sound experiences," he says. "Every so often I would sit down by the piano and play a single note. I changed a lot during this time."

The immediate impact was obvious in Aus den Sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days), a piece of "intuitive music" in which, after fasting, musicians improvised using as inspiration texts that Stockhausen had written during his hunger strike: "Play a vibration in the rhythm of dreaming/and slowly transform it/into the rhythm of the universe," ran one. He also composed a variety of mystical works, such as Stimmung (Tuning, 1968), a choral work based on talismanic chants and erotic poetry, and Sternklang, based on musical "modules" derived from stellar constellations and sung by torch-bearing relay runners.

In 1974 Stockhausen met Suzanne Stephens, and in 1977 he began work on Licht, which revolves around the struggle between Michael and Eve, who represent humanity, and Lucifer, the temptation of pure evil. Each "day" of the opera is over four hours long and involves a complex interweaving of live music and electronic sound into super-formulae, some of which sound suspiciously melodic. The first part, Donnerstag (Thursday), was performed at La Scala in 1981, and at the Royal Opera in London in 1985, and the subsequent days have had isolated performances in Milan, Leipzig and Bern. Of scenes in one part of the opera, Freitag (Friday), where dancing couples are dressed as Cat and Dog, Football and Boot, Arm and Syringe, a rather bemused Guardian critic said: "The political incorrectness of all this hardly bears thinking about, but it is difficult to ignore the crudity of the symbolism." Stockhausen hopes to finish the final instalment, Sonntag (Sunday), some time in 2005.

His lengthy immersion in Licht has caused his reputation to cool. "At the Music Academy in Cologne, there are many students who don't know if Karlheinz is living or not," says conductor Peter Eötvös, who has worked with him on Licht. "Everybody knows that he is one of the most important composers of the 20th century, but few among the younger generation know his career continues." It is difficult to gauge what long-term effect the ferocious media reaction sparked by his recent comments will have on this ailing reputation, though there can be little doubt that his own withdrawal to Kürten, and the potential loss of the summer courses, will plunge Stockhausen into further isolation.

However, even this couldn't erase the fact that he has produced - and, in a more wilful manner, continues to produce - some of the most challenging, unwieldy, indigestible and formidable music: "Life has taught me that it can only go up," he concludes stubbornly. "The music is spreading now very fast, in America, in a few European countries, even in Russia, though they have no means to produce it. And a few musicologists have their own homepages on my music. The whole globe is waking up increasingly fast. So, I don't need to worry when I die. The music has its own impetus, its own force."

Stockhausen's Hymnen opens the Elektronic Festival at the Barbican, London, at 8pm on October 13. Box office: 020 7638 8891.

Life at a glance

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Born: August 22 1928, Mödrath, near Cologne.

Education: 1947-51 National Conservatory of Music in Cologne (piano, music education) and Cologne University (German philology, philosophy, musicology); 1954-56 Bonn University (phonetics, information and communication theory).